Thursday, 9 October 2014

Over the past few years, the police have been thinking the
unthinkable.Faced with a 20 per cent
budget cut courtesy of the Coalition’s severe post-financial crisis
‘comprehensive spending review’, many forces have been toying with the policy
of privatising frontline services to save money.Drawing upon new research I have just
published in the British Journal of Criminology and Criminology and Criminal Justice,
here are 5 reasons why this policy has been so difficult to implement.

1. Media
scaremongering

At no point have any police forces sold off their frontline
services to the private sector.What
they have been doing is contracting out some of these services – such as
custody, call handling and managing police station front counters – to the
private sector for a limited duration. So ‘privatisation’ is probably the wrong
word for what the police have been doing since it implies a far greater degree
of market penetration than is actually happening.‘Outsourcing’ is a much better word.So why are we talking about the ‘privatisation’
of the police? Because this is how
newspapers have framed the debate.They
have peppered their headlines with the word ‘privatisation’ in anticipation
that it will strike fear in the heart of the public and, in turn, shift more
copies.A more nuanced commentary on
police ‘outsourcing’ does not have the same fear-inducing effect.This has, predictably, caused problems for
senior police officers who are being called upon to justify the ‘privatisation’
of what many regard as an inherently governmental service when they are not in
fact privatising anything at all.(And,
yes, I am fully aware that I have shamelessly employed the same
attention-grabbing tactic in the title of this blog!)

2. Public Fear

Of course, the reason why such media scaremongering has been
so effective is because many members of the public are truly fearful of what
might happen if police forces are over-exposed to the market. While barely a day passes without some form of
public outrage directed towards instances of police malpractice or incompetence,
at a deep level the average citizen does hold the idea of the police close to
their heart.Generations of children have grown up being instructed by
their parents to dial ‘999’ if ever they find themselves in imminent
danger.Uniformed police officers give
talks in schools to educate young people about the protective role of the
police in a civilized society.‘Cops’
are frequently depicted as the ‘good guys’ in pursuit of the ‘bad guys’ in
popular television and cinema.All of
which serve to inculcate the benevolent liberal conception of the police into
our cultural make up.Privatising – or
more accurately outsourcing – this core public service understandably
sparks fear and anxiety among the public.This makes the task of senior police officers even harder. A fearful public spurred on by a
scaremongering media is not an easy audience to persuade.

3. Scepticism in the
senior ranks

While the Home Office exerts significant influence over the
direction of police policy, Chief Constables – and now Police and Crime
Commissioners (PCC) – nevertheless enjoy considerable autonomy when weighing up
different policy options.The enduring
principle of constabulary independence means that, if they want to, the 43
police forces can do things in 43 different ways.So it has been with outsourcing.Some have embraced outsourcing, others have
rejected it outright.Why?Certainly there are structural factors at
play.Some forces have more access to
council tax revenues than others do, providing some insulation from central
government budget cuts, and making radical policy responses less
necessary.Some have more ‘fat to trim’
from their bureaucracies than others do, meaning more savings can be made
through internal rationalisation.However, there is another key factor.Many senior police officers are simply not comfortable with – or are
actively hostile towards – a greater role for the private sector.Not only have they gone through the same
processes of childhood socialisation as every other citizen, but in their adult
careers they have then chosen to embody ideals of the police – they’ve even
sworn an oath to the Queen. So they refuse
to engage with the market and seek other ways out of their financial dire
straits.This means that in some forces outsourcing
never enters onto the agenda as a matter of principle.And for those forces that do entertain this option,
they are faced with scepticism not only from the public, but from their
colleagues too.

4. Inexperience in contracting
out

But let’s assume that there are some forces with a
challenging structural context and a senior command group who are prepared to
give outsourcing a go – and there are a few – then surely it’s simply a matter
of dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s, right?Not quite.The world of public
sector outsourcing is a complex one, especially for an institution which has
almost no experience of its intricacies.When putting together a proposal, interested private sector providers
will want to know the business processes and unit costs of every single service
included in the invitation for tender.However, police forces don’t think in terms of business processes and
unit costs.They think in terms of
victims and criminals, evidence and arrests.Gathering this information together can therefore be a long and
painstaking task of self examination which may never reach a conclusion,
especially in such a tricky political environment.This is something that Surrey Police and West
Midlands Police found out the hard way when their controversial £1.5 billion
outsourcing deal failed to see daylight after years of effort.

5. Staffing the
contract

Just for a minute, let’s say that there are forces with a
challenging structural context, a senior command group who are prepared to give
outsourcing a go, and who have sufficient knowledge of their business processes
and unit costs to put together an outsourcing deal before the media, public and
colleagues make such a move politically impossible – and there is in fact only
one such force, Lincolnshire – then surely meaningful outsourcing is
doable?Yes and no.Yes, in the sense that it is undeniable that
in December 2011 Lincolnshire Police signed a £229 million contract with G4S to
deliver 18 services areas – including some on the frontline – over a 10-15 year
period.No, in the sense that despite
this major transformation in Lincolnshire Police’s organisational structure,
some things really haven’t changed that much.This is in part by choice.Lincolnshire Police have been careful to strike a balance between
protecting their distinctive public service ethos and reaping rewards from the
business process outsourcing expertise of G4S.But it is also in part a consequence of how the contract has been
staffed.G4S have not simply replaced
Lincolnshire Police staff with G4S staff – indeed, it would be illegal to do so
– rather they have inherited the Lincolnshire Police staff already in position
through TUPE regulations.This means
that, in many instances, the individual responsible for delivering the
outsourced service has worked for Lincolnshire Police their entire life and
approaches the job in exactly the same as they had done before G4S arrived on
the scene.Other than their ID badge
which now reads Lincolnshire Police-G4S, not much has changed. Sceptics will no doubt breath a little sigh of
relief, for it appears as though their worst fears are not being realised.But for those who are trying to initiate
change in the police, it represents just one more barrier to outsourcing.

Adam’s research focuses on three interconnected themes: (i) the rise of the private security and private military industries in the postwar era; (ii) corresponding issues of governance, regulation and legitimacy in the contemporary security sector; and (iii) the changing nature of state-market relations. These interests are multi-disciplinary, lying at the intersection of politics, international relations, criminology and socio-legal studies. His recent publications include: The Politics of Private Security (Palgrave Macmillan) and The Everyday Life of the State (University of Washington Press).

On Tuesday, the 7th of October, the
Department of Politics organised a roundtable on the Scottish Referendum that
was held on the 18th of September. The event was attended by
students and political activists, faculty and members of the public. Several
members of staff contributed insights into various aspects of this historic
event. Ignacio Jurado provided a detailed analysis of the vote. Several factors
were discussed: class, age, gender, economic expectations, ideological
commitments, attitudes towards devolution and the establishment. Sandra
Alfonso-Leon provided a comparison between the Scottish and Catalan contexts, focusing
on the role of political elites, the profile of the independence voter and the
position of the rest of the

country. Nick Ritchie approached the topic of
nuclear weapons and discussed the function they played in the vision of
statehood proposed by the SNP for an independent Scotland – a vision
counterpoised to the British foreign and defence policy. Martin Smith broached
the thorny topic of constitutional change in the Westminster model and
highlighted the democratic illegitimacy of the pledges made by the leaders of
the three national parties in the week preceding the referendum. Last but not
least, Jim Buller discussed the implications of the Scottish referendum for the
upcoming national elections and the projected EU referendum. The presentations
were followed by a Q and A period.

A small country. A suffocating debt. A crisis. There would
be hardly a better time to breathe some freedom. This was the motto of the 3rd
Annual Conference of theFundação Francisco Manuel dos Santos, a Portuguese
charitable trust whose mission is to study and promote debate on the Portuguese
society. Over two days, artists, writers, journalists, and political theorists,
such as Jeremy Waldron (Oxford), Seyla Benhabib (Yale), Michael Ignatieff
(Harvard), Roberto Mangabeira Unger (Harvard), and Monica Brito Vieira (York)
gathered in the Cultural Centre ofBelém,
Lisbon, to debate the concept of freedom and its current constraints with an
audience of 1500 people. The conference was covered live by a national TV
station and streamline to most universities in the country, with speakers
engaging with questions sent by their students. Debates were both in English
and in Portuguese.